Archive for July, 2007

In Acrobat 8.0, Adobe introduced support for 2D GPU (Graphic Processor Unit) rendering on Windows based systems. If you haven’t already discovered this new functionality in Acrobat 8.0: Go to Edit > Preferences > Page Display > enable “Use 2D GPU acceleration”. If this check box does not appear on your system, you likely don’t have a graphics card that meets the minimum requirements for Acrobat 8.0. (See link below) By default in Acrobat 8.0 this functionality wasn’t enabled, but the cat is out of the bag now! As a result Acrobat 8.0 users with qualifying video cards and up to date display drivers can experience the power of GPU rendering. Tasks such as panning, zooming and page flipping have become much faster in Acrobat 8.0 with the GPU rendering enabled. What follows are suggestions for making the most of your GPU acceleration while using Acrobat 8.0.

a. When an embedded 3D Window is active, try disabling 3D animations when possible. To disable 3D animations: Click inside the 3D window > do a Right click > select Disable 3D. Since both 2D GPU rendering and 3D rendering are competing for the same resources the system can become sluggish when there aren’t enough resources to go around.
b. Try changing the display resolution: go to Settings > Control Panel > Display > Settings tab > Change screen resolution. Problems may occur during page display viewing when using display resolutions above 1600 x 1200. Limiting the display resolution may improve overall 2D rendering performance.
c. For faster panning and zooming consider “Wireframe” viewing. To enable wireframe viewing in Acrobat: go to View > Line Weights (shortcut keys CTRL + 5). Wireframe view puts less stress on the GPU for documents that contain significant vector data due to the fact the fewer pixels have to be drawn.
d. Close unused windows, Problems may occur when working with many PDF documents open at a time when the 2D GPU is enabled. As the resources on the graphics card become overloaded the on screen rendering performance may degrade.

It must be noted that performance improvements in Acrobat 8.0 will vary depending on system configuration. Some systems that meet the Acrobat 8.0 GPU requirements may not show significant performance gains due to low GPU performance. In general lower end video cards will show smaller performance gains than higher end graphic cards from the same vendor. Other video cards, even though compatible with Acrobat 8.0 GPU requirements, will have the GPU acceleration check box grayed out because the video display driver may not be compatible with the current version of Acrobat on your system. For a complete list of video cards compatible with Acrobat 8.0 and display driver’s information, visit the following Adobe Support websites:

In Acrobat 8.1, the list of tested video cards was expanded to include the latest video cards from ATI and NVIDIA. Acrobat 8.1 also includes supports for Windows Vista 32, Windows XP 64 bit and Windows Vista 64 bit.